Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Friday, July 11, 2008

Poem for the night

I had a really fun night out with last weekend, and this week I've been editing a poem that I wrote about that night.


Good Old Men


“He looks like my grandpa,” you said

at Ned Kelly’s Last Stand.

Floating in the watery jazz,

I imagined a sunbrowned boy under Philippine sun,

the trumpet player before us speaking something

soothingly, as good old men do, in tagalog.


“I’m 22.” “You’re so young!”

And I suppose that makes you an old man.

I don’t know many old men. My grandfather,

a shoemaker, his back hurts from bending

over the shapes of other people’s feet.


There was also something said

about paper boats and that they were empty, but

with the night so full it’s incidental.

You joke about wanting to fuck me.

The siren before us has just married a man named Brett:

What an American name, how American.


For Brett is a name which celebrates itself,

announcing in a maleness like the light

glancing off the trumpet as it solos –

Brett is a man, and he is here.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Cleaning Up to Find "Love"

Sorry loklok. I didn't get your permission before posting this. woopsh.

I was cleaning out my laptop bag and I found a manila envelope with a few of your poems in it. I'm not sure how I got it, but I did. I like this one the best. It's called "Love." It's kind of appropriate at this time, since we've been talking on the phone and over gchat about such a thing.

Loklok, perhaps you should write more poems. I liked the ones you did for your portfolio.

Love

To Resolve bodies into planes and no further.

For, to suppose, that a body, a magnitude,
is divisible, through and through,
that division is possible, involves a difficulty.

What will there be,
in the body which escapes division?

Let it
have been divided.

What then will remain? A magnitude?
No, that is impossible. Since there will be
something not divided.

But, if it be admitted that neither a body, nor a magnitude
remain, and yet division is to take place,
the constituents of the body will be points or nothing.
An absurdity without magnitude.

For when the points were in contact,
to form a single magnitude, they did not make
the whole any bigger.

But suppose that, as the body, beign divided,
a minute section - a piece of sawdust, is extracted
evading division

even then the argument applies.

For in what sense is that section divisible?
For what came away was not a body but a separable form or quality.
Every contact being always a contact of somethings.
There is always something, besides the contact,
or the division,
or the point.